Whenever a document is stored, either on company owned hardware or with an Internet Storage Provider (Cloud based storage), this storage comes with a price and associated risks. Within a company's own infrastructure, the decision of where to store data is very important. For example Tier III storage will be cheap but may offer no redundancy or backup protection, whist storing data in Tier I is expensive and affords protection against downtime and data loss.
The proliferation of Cloud based storage has made it possible to store data with no capital expenditure which makes it very attractive to companies looking to manage storage costs. However, storing data in the Cloud brings with it even more complication when it comes to the decision on where to store data; big differences exist between Cloud storage providers on both cost and security. This is compounded by the fact that some providers locate their datacenters in different jurisdictions which can have significant legal implications for the storage of certain classifications of data.
Because there is currently no way to automate the routing of data based on its content and/or classification to the most appropriate storage provider, companies must take a ‘blanket’ approach to storage by providing their employees with storage locations and a policy on how they are used. This manual approach can lead to some data being stored inappropriately, with non-sensitive and unregulated data stored in expensive storage and sensitive or regulated data being stored in cheap, unsecured storage.
Another important aspect affecting the cost, security and compliance responsibilities of data storage is data lifetime. For regulatory reasons certain classifications of data must be kept for a specified time period. However, storing data for longer than necessary also has a big impact on cost. Again a company must currently adopt a ‘blanket’ approach to data lifetime management by archiving data after a certain date. Issues surrounding this approach include data being archived too soon (expensive to recover if necessary), too late (incurs additional storage expense) or being unnecessarily archived when out-of-date data can be simply deleted.
Systems currently exist that will seamlessly move data between storage tiers and abstract the complexity of interacting with Cloud storage providers, but these system do not take account the document content or data classification.